Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) vs Mailchimp

Excel your business’ marketing automation

Managing your marketing assets and efforts can be an overwhelming task as it requires many steps and great organisational skills. Mailchimp and Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) are the most common platforms used to manage marketing automation. But which one brings more benefits to the table if your business is already using Salesforce?

In this article, we’ll dive into the differences between Mailchimp and Salesforce Marketing Account Engagement.

What are the differences between Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Mailchimp?

Both Mailchimp and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement are renowned marketing automation platforms.

With Mailchimp, you can design and measure the success of your integrated marketing campaigns, such as emails, social media ads, electronic postcards and landing pages. You can also track your campaigns’ overall performance with metrics, such as click-through and opening rates. By gaining these insights into your assets, your business can improve future campaigns and adjust marketing efforts accordingly.

Mailchimp also enables you to create audience lists, with which you can segment your target audiences according to your pre-determined criteria. Lastly, Mailchimp offers its own Customer Journey Builder, which helps you to design automated emails based on interactions your customers have with your range of digital content. This feature allows you to create targeted customer experiences and improve engagement with your content.

Apart from creating social media content, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement also enables you to set up lead generation forms and landing pages to capture your audiences’ interest and collect their details. With such valuable background information on your prospects, your marketing and sales teams can work together to guide customers through their journey and retain them more efficiently.

Why is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement more beneficial than Mailchimp?

When comparing the core features for successful marketing automation from both Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Mailchimp, it’s clear that Marketing Cloud Account Engagement promises a more beneficial solution for your business in the long run.

Optimise your customers’ journey and content engagement with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Vs Mailchimp | Platinum Salesforce Partner | Pracedo

A customer journey map helps you visualise your customers’ experience. It allows you to build a journey based on your customers’ interaction with your company’s digital content.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers an automation tool called Engagement Studio, with which you can create a unique customer journey tailored to your business. With the Engagement Studio tool, you can send emails to a list of customers, analyse how they react to them and then respond accordingly with a logic program.

This logic program can command different types of steps, actions, triggers and rules within the customer journey.

  • Actions enable you to make commands, like ‘send an email today’.
  • Triggers listen for an event to occur within a period of time, such as ‘when a customer opens the email today’.
  • Rules can be used to check a customer’s activity score.


Together, these steps help you send out email campaigns that efficiently engage customers at every step of their journey. Like this, you can easily design a journey that lays out several possible actions and trigger steps for your audience.

Let’s say your business launches two consecutive email campaigns. For that, you can design a specific customer journey where a first email is sent, and a follow-up email would only be sent if the first email had been opened. With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, you can create an alternative branch in your customer journey and add another action or trigger step: For example, if a customer didn’t open the first email but instead visited your website after receiving your email, they would still be sent a follow-up email.

By accounting for these various customer engagement scenarios and creating the respective customer journeys, you can optimise your marketing campaigns and ensure greater engagement overall.

Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement also allows you to track customer engagement across multiple channels. It can detect and connect every move from your customers – from both your website and social media channels.

How does Mailchimps Customer Journey Builder work?

On the flipside, Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder offers a rather limited engagement journey, entailing steps that focus solely on your customers’ interaction with your email campaigns. Similar to the Engagement Studio tool within Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, the Customer Journey Builder also includes action and rule steps. However, unlike Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, it does not track engagement across multiple channels, therefore restricting your team from connecting your email marketing to interactions from other channels.

For example, if a prospect subscribed to your website, then you can add an action step that automatically sends out a welcome email to that customer. However, Mailchimp’s system does not allow you to create alternative branches that account for interactions with your brand on other channels. This limits your ability to track and engage your customers accordingly and limits the performance of your marketing automation.

More seamless data integration to Salesforce with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Pardot vs Mailchimp | Platinum Salesforce Partner | Pracedo

As Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a native Salesforce product, no integration with Salesforce is required. However, since Mailchimp does not belong to the Salesforce family, a separate connector is required in order to integrate the platform with Salesforce.

Although audience and campaign data is synced with Salesforce from both platforms, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement allows a more accurate integration.

Although marketing campaigns created in Mailchimp can be integrated with Salesforce, users can only manage and adjust these campaigns within Mailchimp. This is because marketing campaigns that are created in Mailchimp can be integrated and seen in Salesforce, but can only be managed and adjusted in Mailchimp.

Additionally, if a lead or contact opts out in Salesforce after they were added to your Mailchimp audience, they will still remain subscribed in Mailchimp. When a contact unsubscribes from a Mailchimp audience, the email opt-out field in their Salesforce contact or lead record will not change either. This means your Mailchimp users have to manually update both the Salesforce and Mailchimp audiences to ensure they are opted out and will no longer receive emails from your organisation. On the other hand, if a contact opts out from Marketing Cloud Account Engagement e-mails, the opt-out field in their Salesforce contact or lead record will be automatically ticked thanks to the optimised data synchronisation between the two platforms.

Lastly, with Mailchimp synchronising data only on an hourly basis, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is more accurate as it syncs the data every two to four minutes.

Unlimited audience segmentation opportunities with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

When it comes to segmenting your audience, Mailchimp categorises prospects into groups based on similar characteristics, such as purchase activity, age or location. However, the platform is limited to a total of five segmentation criteria overall, leaving you with little flexibility when creating your audience lists.

Mailchimp also has a Query Builder feature that allows you to integrate leads and contacts from Salesforce into Mailchimp. This integration is based on your chosen query criteria, such as location or job. For example, if you want to send an email to contacts and leads that are located in Victoria only, this feature is very useful. You can use the Query Builder and input “Victoria” as the query criteria. This will then integrate all the contacts and leads from your Salesforce account that are located in Victoria into a segmented audience list in Mailchimp. However, there is a major limitation to this feature, as Mailchimp’s segmented lists would not be automatically updated if you made adjustments to your leads or contacts in Salesforce.

Instead, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement gives you all the leeway you need when segmenting your audiences, as prospects can be segmented into an infinite number of lists with no criteria limitations. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s segmentation criteria further cover behavioural scoring, which is determined based on prospects’ engagement with your content and platforms. As a result, your organisation is provided with insights to optimise your marketing efforts for every individual.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement also incorporates a dynamic list system, which enables constant updates in your segmented lists. This dynamic list feature is very convenient, as you do not have to remove or change contacts in your segmented lists manually. Any contact changes in Salesforce will automatically be updated in your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement account.

Gather maximum information about your leads with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Forms

With Mailchimp’s Form Builder you can create customisable lead generation forms to collect relevant data about your leads. Once a form is submitted, information about the lead will directly be stored in the audience section within your Mailchimp account. The information you collect ranges from basic details, such as their name or email, to more specific data, such as their interests. You can also change the answers’ formatting by changing the respective field type. Let’s say you want to know the age of your lead, then you can simply use the number field type. This means that the form will only accept a number as an answer to this specific question. Mailchimp offers a total of 13 different field types for you to choose from.

 

Although Mailchimp’s Form Builder provides customisable lead generation forms, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s Forms seem to have more functionalities as you can do more than just customisation. One of many benefits is that Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has progressive profiling, which is a feature that makes your data collection process more effective.

The purpose of progressive profiling is to collect relevant information about your leads without overwhelming your customers with too many questions all at once. This works by creating various form fields and queueing them up one by one. This will help avoid repeated data in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s system. For example, if you already have information about a lead’s name, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s Form will display the next queued-up questions. These queued-up questions will only appear once the previous question fields have been filled in and submitted into your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement system.

 

With progressive profiling, you are able to get more information from your leads as the questions appear gradually. This is very useful for your business, as collecting information progressively allows you to create a wholesome profile of your prospects over time and to serve their needs more efficiently.

Optimise your marketing automation with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement today

Isn’t it interesting to see the positive impact that just one tool can have on your business? If you are keen to take your marketing automation to the next level, get in touch today and schedule an initial consultation with our experienced Marketing Cloud Account Engagement consultants here.

_

Pracedo is an award-winning Summit (Platinum) Salesforce Consulting Partner that delivers innovative Salesforce implementations to forward-thinking customers.

With over a decade of experience focused on Salesforce, we work with our customers to unlock the platform’s power through tailored implementations that facilitate achieving business goals and ambitions. Our talented team of over 80 Salesforce professionals globally means that Pracedo offers a boutique consultancy experience, delivered locally to you, with the breadth and depth of knowledge earned from delivering over 1000 projects across our locations.

Pracedo specialises in Digital Transformation and Change Management. Implementations and customisations include: Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.

Discover The Impact Of Pracedo